


Without Dawning

by recrudescence



Category: House M.D.
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-09
Updated: 2010-05-09
Packaged: 2017-10-09 09:22:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-S4. House and Wilson aren’t the only ones who have to cope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without Dawning

Third grade. Melody Cain: hair in barrettes, knife-sharp knees. Doodling lions on the backs of pages in her wide-ruled composition books. Remy drew a tiger in her own and shyly showed it to her. “What’s that supposed to be?” asked Melody. Remy spent the rest of the day hunched in her chair like a crumpled sheet of paper.

Seventh. Modern dance. Sasha Berntzen had amazing extension. Neither of them had ever kissed a girl; they had giggled and admitted as much in the changing room. Remy had tugged a sweater over her skinny shoulders and wondered if she would be able to feel Sasha’s braces if they did. Kenny Rapone dared them to later in the school year and they leaned in for a hasty peck that made Sasha pull back laughing and Remy force a smirk despite her leaping stomach. Sasha started going out with Kenny after that and Remy had felt alone and betrayed.

                                                                                           

Freshman year, NYU. Nothing to hide, everything to learn. Meredith Henry lasted the longest, almost four months.

Wilson and Amber had lasted longer, but not by much, in the grand scheme of things.

Thinking about Meredith, about any of them, just made Remy feel sick now. She had put relationships on the back burner, too consumed with a compulsion to cram her life full of as many experiences as possible before she left it for good.

At least before, she’d had the blessing of ambiguity. There were no uncertainties now, even though she’d shredded the test results and thrown them away. Making sure to use a trashcan outside the hospital, in case House somehow picked up on her decision and went rooting through the garbage to find some answers of his own.

_Ratatouille_ was playing on her next day off. She took her nephew. The main character was a rat named Remy, which amused him greatly. She could hardly remember a word of the film, but everyone was so busy laughing they didn’t notice her dozing off.

The good aunt, she deposited him back at her brother’s place, got asked to stay for dinner by him and his wife—said no, graciously making up an excuse. She felt too terrible to try and put up a happy face. Jerome was negative for Huntington’s, and she’d kept her own preferences to herself about getting the test done, an argument they’d had a million times before he’d accepted the fact that she wasn’t going to be swayed.

“Someone I used to work with died the other day and I tested positive for Huntington’s.” She couldn’t say that at the dinner table, in front of a bright-eyed six-year-old. Come to that, she wasn’t sure she could say it at all.

She left for a drink instead, found herself folded up in front of a sticky mud-brown bar at one of the college pubs near campus. The music grated, the gin and tonic was tasteless on her tongue, and nearby a gaggle of girls in tiaras were celebrating somebody’s twenty-first.

Just when she’d decided she was better off going home alone to find some other distraction, one of the girls spilled a drink on her lap and insisted on dragging her into the bathroom to dab at the cloth with paper towels. It wasn’t a very effective method. Angling herself under the hand dryer wasn’t working much better, but over the roaring of the machine and her mind she caught fragments of phrases:  _seriously didn’t mean to do that_ and _I’m Valerie_ and _I’ll buy you something if you want._

What the hell.

Valerie Tran, art history major, pale cheeks spattered with freckles, jet-black hair pulled back in a clip, eyes with the hue and sheen of mahogany. Made her own jewelry and gave Remy a spectacular and probably entirely deliberate view down the front of her shirt when she leaned in to show off her necklace. Found out Remy was a doctor and was endearingly impressed. A little into their conversation, she pulled the lemon off the side of her glass and sucked the juice out of it without so much as a blink. A little later, she got a text from one of her friends across the room and showed it to Remy.

_Looking pretty gay over there_, it read.

“I hooked up with a girl and she dumped me for a guy,” Valerie said dismissively. “I’ve been trying stay with guys for now, since at least none of them ever left me for another guy.”

“I’ve been there,” Remy told her. Smiled, sipped, waited. “It sucks. Doesn’t always work, but it sucks.”

“That’s why you’re here?”

“Not this time. Just had to take a break. Someone I,” worked with, fought with, was sort of friends with, “knew…died.” Saying it out loud was harder than she had anticipated.

“Sorry. That’s really rough.” Valerie looked at her. “Need to get going?”

It was easy to go along with the implication, lift a shoulder noncommittally and say something about needing to change clothes anyway, punctuate it with some lighthearted jibe at the girl’s expense. Either she’d had too much to drink or she hadn’t had enough, but the words and motions came to Remy as easily as if they’d been programmed into her brain.

Valerie had a penchant for lip-biting and a tattoo of a trendy nautical star on one hip, which Remy kissed and felt grateful for not making too many stupid mistakes during her own college days. She hoped she didn’t end up becoming one of Valerie’s.

Pale fingers hooking into Remy’s belt loops, Remy’s spine arching when Valerie let her hold her wrists down to the mattress (she’d had an under-bed restraint system at one point, courtesy of an ex, and still sometimes regretted getting rid of all the trappings in order to help her get rid of the memories) and make her berry-red and writhing before lapping between her legs. The doctor in her shrieked that she should stop, step back, use fucking a dental dam—she didn’t know where this girl might have been, but she couldn’t care. Her diagnosis had made her reckless.

She’d actually once contemplated sleeping with Wilson because, according to House, he was used to having girlfriends leave him in some way or another. If anyone else had a cause for a downward spiral, it was him. Maybe they could bond over that sometime.

For now, this was a good start.

A sound like sobbing from that lipstick-smeared mouth, not quite enough to make her push her preoccupations aside but certainly close. Remy kept her pinned in place, then moved, lining her long frame up against Valerie’s from behind, on their sides, and fucking her that way until the girl squirmed flat on her stomach: tan soft legs wide, cunt slick and wet-pink and three of Remy’s fingers buried to the hilt inside it. The thought crossed her mind to take it further, spreading her open, teasing the other soft entrance to her body with a slick fingertip or even her tongue.

Maybe another time. She didn’t know this girl. She had time to be reckless later. No telling how much, but time was time.

Nibbling an ear, little silver hoops and cartilage against her tongue, shudders underneath her. Dimly, she realized her jeans were still on and she wasn’t making this any easier on herself, that there were other things on her mind that were still bubbling up like water boiling on a flame too high.

And because, really, that was just what she did. Tore herself apart trying to feel alive, traveled the world but always came home. Faced the cold, hard calculations in the end and went right back to running. She pushed the girl’s hand aside with an automatic smile and murmured something about needing to get to bed.

Valerie’s phone bleeped from another text and she murmured back something about needing to head back to the bar. Pecking Remy on the lips and pulling herself back together: tight jeans, metallic flats, loose tank top, chunky necklaces. Chime of another text arriving with a cheery, tinny ring, not like the steady, solemn tick of Amber’s EKG or her own nagging brain. Valerie was saying something and Remy felt too impossibly exhausted to do anything other than stare.

“Ladies’ night’s every Thursday, if you wanna come. Or just give me a call if you need to talk, okay?” The door closed with a click before Remy could reply. Outside, Valerie was already laughing into her phone. 

Remy heard her dancing down the hall, blithe and bright and so stupidly young.

Dragging herself into the bathroom, she brushed her teeth, washed her face, and avoided looking in the mirror, ready to fall into bed and become Thirteen again. She had work the next day.

  


End file.
